What TV shows did you watch as a kid?
“Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin?” That was how Listen With Mother opened on the Radio. A nice comfortable, happy, programme of stories for children.
Television was in its infancy. We had Andy Pandy, and the Flowerpot men. I loved them. We had Children’s Hour. Then we went out and played together in the street. Safe streets. All the mums at home. The rare exceptions being war widows.
Women now had to be in the workforce because so many men had died in the war. But mums were still generally able to be at home. It was expected. Raising children was important.
You can imagine how many of the problems we have now did not exist.
The next programme I really remember watching is the first ever Star Trek. TV just wasn’t important.
I do remember iconic moments though. I missed the Queen’s first televised Christmas message, I was only six months old.
I saw, and it’s etched in my memory, the report of the assassination of John F Kennedy. My grandfather died in the October and Kennedy was shot in the November. Caroline Kennedy is six months younger than me, and she’d lost her daddy. I knew how much I was hurting.
It was probably my first experience of empathy. But it felt horrible that everyone was looking at them. I hid when my grandad died. Even at my tender age I thought it was bad that she couldn’t. I will never forget John F Kennedy Junior saluting his father’s coffin as it went past. He must have been all of three.
So not many kid’s shows, but between that and the 1969 moon landings, I saw so many iconic things.
Plus I had a childhood untroubled by the entire world. Where you made your own entertainment, with a ball, a tennis racket, your parents, your dear little brother. Your friends.
In the street, safely. Free to go where the fancy took you in a big gang, and turn up at lunchtime and tea time. Making up your own magical stories. My husband had the whole of New Zealand’s natural world to explore, starting right outside his own front door.
Who needed television?
Happy Monday
Deb xx
Deb Hawken - Amorah 